The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step – Lao Tzu. Let me start this post with something totally unrelated – the making of atomic bomb. As you all know, it needs Uranium. Uranium comes in two flavors – the abundant 238 flavor and the rare 235 flavor. If you start with… Continue reading How Daily Yahoo Newsletter Makes Money
Fluttering of a butterfly can cause a tornado. The Daily Yahoo Newsletter experiment was the proverbial fluttering of butterfly that caused a tornado for Yahoo CRM Marketing team. Yahoo used to outsource the CRM operations to Cheetahmail. The deal was – one dollar got you 100 emails. Or 1000 emails. Or 10,000 emails. I forget… Continue reading Daily Yahoo – The Scale It Up Phase
If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain – Francis Bacon Friend 1: Are you seeing Yahoo homepage? Friend 2: Yes. Friend 1: Do you see what I see? Friend 2: No! It turns out that everyone sees different articles on Yahoo homepage. It is personalized heavily. What Yahoo does is, it sifts through… Continue reading Daily Yahoo – The Beginning
Today, we are going to play a game to understand the motivations of different participants in advertising. To serve an ad, we need the actual webpage where the Ad will be shown. We need an agent to describe this space and submit a request for the ad. This agent is called “Publisher”. To server an… Continue reading The Ad Game
Beacons? Pixels? Tags? What difference does a word make? As it turns out, quite a lot! So, in what follows, I will highlight those key words, so that we pay attention to them! I was new to the domain of adding conversion pixels to web pages. I was asked to find the mismatch between traffic numbers… Continue reading Piggyback and Container Tags
Be Careful What You Wish For – Goethe I had an ambition – I wanted to understand the entire source code of Yahoo! I mean, I was your garden variety senior software engineer working on one tiny aspect of Yahoo, yet, I had the grand ambition to understand how all of it worked. Those were… Continue reading Conversion Pixels For Web – Educating Product Managers And Engineers
Don’t teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig – Robert Heinlein Pig Scripts query big data and generate output files. Once. If you want them to do the same thing everyday, you need to schedule them. That is where Oozie comes in. Oozie is a pig scheduler. Now, obviously,… Continue reading Pig Scripts and Oozie Workflow
Philosopher: Which came first – the chicken or the egg? Storm Developer: It depends on the topology! WHEN If you are an advertiser, there are two common situations when you will absolutely need real time event processing: Transactional Emails / Trigger Based Emails: The user performs an action in one part of your product eco-system… Continue reading Real Time Signaling – Storm Topologies
You can spin up a web server on your laptop by typing the following command in your terminal. python -m CGIHTTPServer That is it! You can test it out by creating an html file in the same folder called index.html and accessing it through browser by typing http://localhost:8000/index.html Let us say the contents of index.html was:… Continue reading How Link Redirection Works
$100,000 One Hundred Thousand Dollars. Just sitting there in plain sight – waiting to be picked up. It is yours, if you only have the courage and wisdom to pick it up. No one is stopping you! There is no resistance. “What is the catch?”, you may ask. There is none really! It is an… Continue reading How to query Hadoop for getting counts
MarketEng 